The Well-trained Renegade: Profile of Wang Yuping

by Elliat Albrecht

Profile of WANGYUPING. Photo by Elliat Albrecht for ArtAsiaPacific.

From one look at a larger-than-life self-portrait in Wang Yuping’s Beijing studio, it’s clear that the artist paints himself older than he actually appears. Though the red glasses and spiky grey stubble are the same, in person, he is youthful and amiable with a quick smile and the same observational, quotidian humor seen in his paintings. But it’s a cliché now to claim that an artist is just concerned with the everyday; Wang’s work serves to record his perception of secular life in a post-authoritarian era. In the 1980s, he studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, beginning in the ceramics department before transferring to oil painting in 1985. Yet he wasn’t interested in the Socialist Realist teachings of the time, which focused on stiff, rational representations and which retained the official and propagandistic connotations of a fast-receding era of Chinese history. Wang even considered dropping out until a professor encouraged him to stay—a blessing, as the formal training would later prove important to his practice. In 1991, alongside his classmates Yu Hong, Liu Xiaodong, and his wife Shen Ling, Wang would participate in the important “New Generation Art Exhibition” in Beijing. In the same year, he showed at the National Art Museum of China, and in 1997, participated in the 47th Venice Biennale.

The comparison between Wang’s painting and music always lingers in the back of my mind, and not just because he relayed his affection for Chinese opera when we first met in his studio in early April 2018. He reminds me chiefly of jazz. Like Wang’s post-Socialist Realist generation, jazz emerged from a time of hardships, and as most musicians must thoroughly learn scales and theory before mastering wild improvisation, Wang absorbed rigid, formal and representational lessons before detonating them, piecing together his own style from the remains. The evidence of this is visible in his bold brushstrokes and line-making, which can at first seem audacious or hasty, but upon closer inspection, are made by a hand with an acute awareness of form, mass and color. He is expressive, polyrhythmic, liquescent—hitting risky and improvised notes—while remaining in his own invented key.

During my visit to his studio, Wang pulled out an eight-panel streetscape of the road outside Beijing’s Beihai Park, propping each sheet of paper against bigger works. The polyptych is something between a painting and a drawing, with larger objects such as vehicles, stone walls, asphalt and people rendered in acrylic; and details overlain in oil pastel—like feverish afterthoughts—to lend depth and form. Public buses are shown dragging down the roads while birds teeter precariously on telephone wires. The work is testament to Wang’s status as something of a modern plein-air master. For the past decade or so, when they are not in their studios, he and his wife have taken to packing their materials into taxis and setting up shop on Beijing’s streets. They make a nondescript pair, dropping in and out of restaurants and cafes for dumplings and coffee during the day as passersby watch with mild interest while they paint the city as they see it.

Works-in-progress at WANGYUPING’s studio. Leaning against the wall are several paintings titled Beihai Park. Photo by Elliat Albrecht for ArtAsiaPacific.

Although a century and continent apart from Monet, Wang studies landscapes over time with a similar dedication, observing outdoor scenes as the light and the bustle of the streets fluctuate. Often, in his multipanel streetscapes, shadows evoke the day’s hour and the rank of Beijing’s infamously polluted air. Hallucinatory teal skies in one panel turn to a dusky, ashen heather in the next. Yet even the dreary, snowy or smoggy scenes are injected with the shocking hues like mints, neon pinks and tangerines that Wang uses liberally throughout his work. Small details like lanterns, license plates, packets of cigarettes and surveillance cameras are rendered attentively in pastel, grounding his paintings in a sense of place. Even if you don’t know Beijing, you may be able to identify it in the particularities of Wang’s scenes.

Wang had the idea to paint Beijing streetscapes in 2010. His affection for the capital is obvious, having lived there since he was born in 1962. Some aspects of his paintings come from his own early recollections—a rosy-cheeked kid flying a kite in Beihai Park (2018) is based on the artist’s memory. When asked if he is concerned with capturing a certain essence of Beijing, Wang shrugged and suggested that maybe his paintings contain more of his own vivacious spirit than the city’s.

Beyond his recent landscapes, Wang is perhaps better known for his lush and rowdy portraits of Beijing’s characters. His approach to figuration borders on anarchistic; he paints people with a confident coolness that is impossible to fake. What is stirring about the work is the impudence of the creative license taken with form, shape and color: hair is painted as frizzled wires, and flesh as mounds of dusty grey, cream and pink. Drips make their way down canvases unhindered by the artist, and, as in the streetscapes, kinetic details are drawn in with pastel. Atop of backgrounds mostly left blank, the subjects of nearly every painting include deeply saturated colors like blood red, gold, violet or electric blue—but never too much. Wang has finessed what is difficult for many artists: he knows when to stop. In the paintings, his models lounge, smoke or stare with their bellies and breasts out; they appear post-coitus, bored, reading or asleep—intimate poses that reveal the long exchange between artist and sitter.

Image of WANGYUPING’s studio. Photo by Elliat Albrecht for ArtAsiaPacific.

Many of those poses were assumed right in Wang’s large studio in the gutted ground floor of what from the outside looks like a suburban house. Even on a grey day, the rays of light streaming in from the skylights above are striking. Hung on one wall are some of his watercolors: meticulous studies of objects like money, food, wrappers and books that show his patience for slow observation. Next to a pile of discarded objects used for a still life and an accumulation of fluorescent acrylic paints is a futon in the middle of the room—loaded with embroidered pillows—which serves as a place for his models to rest.

WANGYUPING’s painting of the view from inside a tuk-tuk (auto-rickshaws) in Thailand. Photo by Elliat Albrecht for ArtAsiaPacific.

Aside from people, creatures such as felines and their avian prey loom large in Wang’s paintings, as do words. He scrawls text right across picture planes with a criminal’s disregard for decorum; the 2011 work My Seed depicts a turned-away pregnant woman and a shirtless, greasy-looking man with a protruding belly rivaling hers. The title of the painting is scribbled above the couple in Chinese, a quippy wisecrack about sex and love. (Such erotic themes are also the artistic concerns of Wang’s wife, some of whose paintings are in the studio, and who sometimes uses her husband as model.) In others, dates, captions and titles are in the middle of the works, hinting at the identities of the characters beneath.

The studio’s walls are lined with such enormous, “defaced” canvases, some piled a dozen deep. The outermost layer is from a recent series. In late 2017, to take a break from Beijing, Wang and Shen headed to Thailand, where they rented an apartment and painted. Travelling and sweating through Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Wang painted sex workers and ladyboys in his characteristically large format—the paintings tower over the artist’s own head. Local flowers, tigers and Thai script adorn the colorful images of scantily clad bodies. A series of fanciful paintings of tuk-tuks in neons like lime and poster-paint purple were rendered from his memory, the particulars like speedometers, window stickers and rearview mirror reflections drawn in at his temporary studio. The most recent example of Wang’s flamboyant blend of minutia and energetic expression, the works will be on view this June at Tang Cotemporary in Hong Kong, along with Beihai Park. Will he work while in Hong Kong—another Asian city whose buildings are already colored in prismatic hues? Not sure, Wang replied as we said goodbye—first he needs a break.

The author wishes to thank Nessa Cui for her help with translation in Beijing.